(DCNF)—Vice President Kamala Harris’ lead pollster, David Binder, said Sunday on a podcast that “high turnout” is no longer a good indicator for Democrats, as it had been in previous election cycles.
The race between Harris and former President Donald Trump has tightened significantly in the polls with less than ten days before Election Day. On “Pod Save America,” Binder told co-host Dan Pfeiffer that the polling landscape has changed since Trump entered the race in 2016, noting that the current outcome remains a “question mark.”
“It used to be … that we had a rule of thumb that the greater the turnout the better it was for Democrats or liberals because young people tended to be a little bit more left-leaning,” Binder said. “They were the ones that were a little bit iffier on voting regularly. While older people, who tended to be a little bit more conservative, would be ‘I’ll vote hell or high water.’ That has changed now. It’s no longer the sense that a high turnout necessarily means good for the liberals, because now with Trump he brought out a group of new voters, back in 2016, that normally would not have voted.”
“And the question we’re facing now in 2024 is: are the people that you know Trump’s focusing on, kind of the maybe young men that have not voted before, will they get off the couch and vote for him? Similarly will some of the people that are normally constituencies of the Democrats come out and vote?” Binder continued. “So you know it may be that in this election a higher turnout does not necessarily mean good things for the Democrats and it may be that some of the people who are leaning Trump end up staying home themselves. That’s why it’s such a question mark right now. The whole game comes out to turnout and the turnout skew could go either direction.”
While Binder appeared confident in Harris at the beginning of the podcast, other polls and political pundits have cautioned the Democratic Party about Trump’s growing momentum with voters. As polls open in key swing states like Georgia and Nevada, ABC News Political Director Rick Klein warned Friday that Democrats are losing the early voting advantage they held in the 2020 election, falling behind GOP voters in both states.
Trump has held a slight lead across the several battleground states since Oct. 18, according to RealClearPolitics polling averages. Nationally, the site shows Trump up by 0.2 points, with 48.6%, while Harris trails closely at 48.4%.
